Preview; RECOMMENDED VIEWING THIS WEEKEND

Soul Survivors Sun 9.15pm BBC1

The South Bank Show Sun 10.45pm ITV

Everyman Sun 11pm BBC1

Equinox Sun 7pm C4

The Persuaders! Sun 6pm C4

There's something odd doing the rounds of Sunday evening drama on BBC1 - something one might call, for simplicity's sake, Middle- Management Escape Fantasy Syndrome, MEFS for short.

In the recent Alan Plater drama Oliver's Travels, Alan Bates's college lecturer is made redundant and heads off on an idiosyncratic search for his favourite crossword setter. In Barry Devlin's two-part Soul Survivors (Sun BBC1), Ian McShane's radio DJ is sacked when he refuses to exchange his classic soul play-list for the likes of Blur and Oasis - and heads off to Memphis, Tennessee to look up his favourite soul band. The idea being to bring them back to the UK and to make some cash out of them.

We might not be able to share Plater's/Devlin's enthusiasm for crossword setters/old soul bands, but in each drama there's a woman to look on and admire their impetuous, middle-aged dreams (of what? lost youth... lost irresponsibility?). In this case it's the radio station researcher, played by the cast-against-type Margi Clarke, whom we discover in self-effacing specs and mugging horribly in a bid to seem demure.

Clint Eastwood, who invites Melvyn Bragg into his Carmel home for The South Bank Show (Sun ITV), knows all about playing down to the camera - in fact he's so deadpan, he makes Mount Rushmore look as if it's over- acting. Squinting at Melvyn, as if Melvyn had just hijacked a bus full of schoolchildren, Clint painfully strings some sentences together about some of his films (Play Misty for Me, Unforgiven and, of course, the one he's here to plug, The Bridges of Madison County), and not much else. He's fairly articulate once Melvyn has him cranked up, but Clint is never exactly going to earn the epithet "gushing" - so there's a couple of writer chappies, Richard Schickel and Christopher Frayling, to add the required analysis.

"The scale of the crisis facing the Catholic Church today is larger than any crisis since the fourth century." Excuse a poor lapsed Prod, but what exactly happened to the Catholic Church in the fourth century? What's happening today, according to the returning Everyman (Sun BBC1), is that more and more child abusers are taking the cloth - an estimated 6,000 of the 50,000 Catholic priests currently dispensing bread and wine in the United States. I have no idea how they reached that figure - unless they have started using the confessional as a polling tool.

Equinox (Sun C4) goes to India to look at magicians who are revered as holy men because they know how to produce a gold ring from "nowhere" (although it's only holy ash if you are poor and in no position to help politically). It would all be laughable if India's politicians weren't all devout believers. Imagine if John Major went on telly to say that David Copperfield really could fly.

And if you don't believe New Laddism is partly ironic, then witness those unreconstructable old lads, Roger Moore and Tony Curtis, let loose from the archives in a re-run of The Persuaders! (Sun C4). This makes you laugh raucously for about 10 minutes as Danny Wilde and Lord Brett Sinclair bounce from one bikinied babe to another. But like Loaded and excitement at Chelsea FC's new signings, it very soon palls.